Successful Research Uptake depends on a whole range of engagement strategies on the part of the university. To bring research outputs outside the academic sector and into communities where they can have direct development impact, universities need to be able to work with mass media outlets to disseminate findings and to raise awareness about research activities.

This blog outlines some key findings of a survey conducted by the Think Tank Initiative in 2013, which surveyed the key information sources that African policy makers use in the decision making process. DRUSSA Universities can use this information to refine their research uptake strategies to target policy makers with their research findings.

One of the more significant debates surrounding the downstream results of Research Uptake concerns the complex task of assessing impact. On the one hand, universities will universally agree that a central part of their core mission is to serve the public good through the applied knowledge they generate for social and developmental change—and academics themselves are obviously also keen to see their own research inspire change and advance developmental goals.

As we ask ourselves how we can build effective, sustainable Research Uptake systems at African universities, we should remind ourselves that similar questions are asked around the world. So, what lessons can be shared across borders, and what are the unique distinctions that differentiate effective Research Uptake systems elsewhere?

Content created by DRUSSA and featured on these sites is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence and may therefore be reproduced free of charge without requiring specific permission.

DRUSSA as a source should be acknowledged as follows:“First published at www.drussa.net/drussa.mobi under the CC BY NC SA 3.0 licence.“

If you are the owner of any content on this site that may be incorrectly attributed, or published unintentionally without the requisite prior permissions having been obtained, please contact info@drussa.net so that we can correct the attribution or remove the item from our database.

Powered by Joomla. The basic code for the DRUSSA software was developed as open source. Copyright to the code written specifically to customise the software belongs to the developers, Perlcom CC.